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The New York Times
October 5, 2007 Friday
Late Edition - Final
Self-Portrait, Assembled, by a Son of Istanbul
By WILLIAM GRIMES
OTHER COLORS
Essays and a Story
By Orhan Pamuk
Illustrated. 433 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95.
Taken together, the scattered essays and sketches that make up
''Other Colors'' can be read as a loose sort of autobiography, Orhan
Pamuk writes in his preface. A stray remark here, a detail there, and
something like a life emerges. We learn that Mr. Pamuk, Turkey's most
eminent novelist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006,
dreamed of being a painter for most of his childhood and youth;
studied architecture but abandoned the pursuit after three years; was
once a leftist; writes very slowly; lived in New York for three
years; and after the great Istanbul earthquake of 1999, constructed a
shelter made of books under his desk.
That last bit sticks in the mind. It's the perfect emblem for a
writer attuned to the cultural and political fault lines running
underneath modern Turkey, and passionate about the novelist's power
to make his own world through words. Mr. Pamuk, urbane and
self-mocking, admires his little literary fort.
''Having assured myself that it was strong enough to withstand
falling concrete,'' he writes, ''I lay down there for a few
earthquake drills, assuming a fetal position as instructed to protect
my kidneys.'' Surrounded by books, he feels safe enough and decides
to skip a long list of recommended precautions.
Mr. Pamuk devotes two essays to the big quake. They are among the
best in a grab bag that includes wispy throwaway newspaper sketches,
prefaces to a variety of classic and modern novels (including his
own), his Nobel acceptance speech, several political essays and a
short story. Nearly all of them end up, one way or another,
addressing art, identity and cultural politics on the European
perimeter.
The least successful do so directly. Mr. Pamuk, a Westernizer and a
liberal, believes in a future for Turkey founded on freedom of speech
and religion. His views have brought down the wrath of Turkey's
authoritarian leaders, notably when he has argued against the
government-enforced taboo that forbids discussion of the mass murder
of Armenians and Kurds in Turkey.
As a political writer, however, he rarely advances beyond noble
sentiment. Turkey should be included in the European Union, he
maintains, because Europe, for reasons he never really explains,
would be incomplete without Turkey. Besides, Turks would feel hurt to
be left out.
Mr. Pamuk returns to form every time he hits the streets of Istanbul,
his native city and reservoir of images. He writes brilliantly about
the hot dog, one of the street foods, along with doner kebabs and the
pizzalike treat known as lahmacun, that seduced him and his brother,
in defiance of their mother's strict orders. It tasted good -- topped
with tomato sauce, tomatoes, pickles and mustard -- but it also
functioned as a potent symbol.
''To leave behind Islamic tradition, whose ideas about food were
embedded in ideas about mothers, women and sacred privacy -- to
embrace modern life and become a city dweller -- it was necessary to
be ready and willing to eat food even if you didn't know where, how
or why it was made,'' he writes.
Likewise, the old coal-fired ferries that ply Istanbul's waters bring
out Mr. Pamuk's most colorful, ruminative writing. So do barbers. Mr.
Pamuk, as a boy, spent productive time in Istanbul's barber shops,
feasting on a humor magazine called Vulture and keeping his ears open
for a conversational style heard nowhere else, a kind of male gossip
elicited, with great subtlety, by the barber himself.
In ''My Father's Suitcase,'' his Nobel lecture, Mr. Pamuk writes that
as a child and as a young writer, he felt as if he lived far from the
center. That has changed.
''For me the center of the world is Istanbul,'' he writes. ''This is
not just because I have lived there all my life, but because for the
last 33 years I have been narrating its streets, its bridges, its
people, its dogs, its houses, its mosques, its fountains, its strange
heroes, its shops, its famous characters, its dark spots, its days
and its nights, making them part of me, embracing them all.''
The Istanbul essays in ''Other Colors'' -- which amplify his 2005
memoir, ''Istanbul: Memories and the City'' -- draw their strength
from the same sources as his fiction, and their comedy, too, notably
the little gem on watching the film ''Cleopatra'' in the 1960s.
At the same time, Mr. Pamuk instantly picks up the frequency of
writers who feel themselves to be on the periphery, like Mario Vargas
Llosa, or Dostoyevsky, the subject of three essays in this
collection. The cultural predicament of Dostoyevsky is Mr. Pamuk's
own, and he zeroes right in on it. The true subject of ''Notes From
Underground,'' he writes, is ''the jealousy, anger and pride of a man
who cannot make himself into a European.''
Mr. Pamuk understands cultural isolation, more deeply than most
writers, perhaps, because he regards reading as a profoundly
isolating experience. The writers he most admires speak to him with
frightening intimacy.
''I felt as if Dostoyevsky were whispering arcane things about life
and humanity, things no one knew, for my ears only,'' he writes.
Almost in passing he offers a probing, quite personal analysis of
degradation as a perverse pleasure in the world of Dostoyevsky's
novels.
The linked sequence of essays about New York counts as a bonus.
Having been mugged, Mr. Pamuk spends a day with the police. He
ponders the mysteries of cinnamon rolls, runs into a long-lost
Turkish friend in a subway station and finally figures out why New
Yorkers hate smoking so much.
''They were not running away from the cancer that smoking might
cause, but from the smoker,'' he concludes. ''I would only gradually
come to understand that my cigarette to them represented a lack of
willpower and of culture, a disordered life, indifference and
(America's worst nightmare) failure.''
When let loose, Mr. Pamuk drops observations like this with deceptive
ease. An expert reader of Istanbul's multilayered text, he must have
found New York's embedded meanings child's play to extract. It's such
a small town, after all, by comparison.
October 5, 2007 Friday
Late Edition - Final
Self-Portrait, Assembled, by a Son of Istanbul
By WILLIAM GRIMES
OTHER COLORS
Essays and a Story
By Orhan Pamuk
Illustrated. 433 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95.
Taken together, the scattered essays and sketches that make up
''Other Colors'' can be read as a loose sort of autobiography, Orhan
Pamuk writes in his preface. A stray remark here, a detail there, and
something like a life emerges. We learn that Mr. Pamuk, Turkey's most
eminent novelist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006,
dreamed of being a painter for most of his childhood and youth;
studied architecture but abandoned the pursuit after three years; was
once a leftist; writes very slowly; lived in New York for three
years; and after the great Istanbul earthquake of 1999, constructed a
shelter made of books under his desk.
That last bit sticks in the mind. It's the perfect emblem for a
writer attuned to the cultural and political fault lines running
underneath modern Turkey, and passionate about the novelist's power
to make his own world through words. Mr. Pamuk, urbane and
self-mocking, admires his little literary fort.
''Having assured myself that it was strong enough to withstand
falling concrete,'' he writes, ''I lay down there for a few
earthquake drills, assuming a fetal position as instructed to protect
my kidneys.'' Surrounded by books, he feels safe enough and decides
to skip a long list of recommended precautions.
Mr. Pamuk devotes two essays to the big quake. They are among the
best in a grab bag that includes wispy throwaway newspaper sketches,
prefaces to a variety of classic and modern novels (including his
own), his Nobel acceptance speech, several political essays and a
short story. Nearly all of them end up, one way or another,
addressing art, identity and cultural politics on the European
perimeter.
The least successful do so directly. Mr. Pamuk, a Westernizer and a
liberal, believes in a future for Turkey founded on freedom of speech
and religion. His views have brought down the wrath of Turkey's
authoritarian leaders, notably when he has argued against the
government-enforced taboo that forbids discussion of the mass murder
of Armenians and Kurds in Turkey.
As a political writer, however, he rarely advances beyond noble
sentiment. Turkey should be included in the European Union, he
maintains, because Europe, for reasons he never really explains,
would be incomplete without Turkey. Besides, Turks would feel hurt to
be left out.
Mr. Pamuk returns to form every time he hits the streets of Istanbul,
his native city and reservoir of images. He writes brilliantly about
the hot dog, one of the street foods, along with doner kebabs and the
pizzalike treat known as lahmacun, that seduced him and his brother,
in defiance of their mother's strict orders. It tasted good -- topped
with tomato sauce, tomatoes, pickles and mustard -- but it also
functioned as a potent symbol.
''To leave behind Islamic tradition, whose ideas about food were
embedded in ideas about mothers, women and sacred privacy -- to
embrace modern life and become a city dweller -- it was necessary to
be ready and willing to eat food even if you didn't know where, how
or why it was made,'' he writes.
Likewise, the old coal-fired ferries that ply Istanbul's waters bring
out Mr. Pamuk's most colorful, ruminative writing. So do barbers. Mr.
Pamuk, as a boy, spent productive time in Istanbul's barber shops,
feasting on a humor magazine called Vulture and keeping his ears open
for a conversational style heard nowhere else, a kind of male gossip
elicited, with great subtlety, by the barber himself.
In ''My Father's Suitcase,'' his Nobel lecture, Mr. Pamuk writes that
as a child and as a young writer, he felt as if he lived far from the
center. That has changed.
''For me the center of the world is Istanbul,'' he writes. ''This is
not just because I have lived there all my life, but because for the
last 33 years I have been narrating its streets, its bridges, its
people, its dogs, its houses, its mosques, its fountains, its strange
heroes, its shops, its famous characters, its dark spots, its days
and its nights, making them part of me, embracing them all.''
The Istanbul essays in ''Other Colors'' -- which amplify his 2005
memoir, ''Istanbul: Memories and the City'' -- draw their strength
from the same sources as his fiction, and their comedy, too, notably
the little gem on watching the film ''Cleopatra'' in the 1960s.
At the same time, Mr. Pamuk instantly picks up the frequency of
writers who feel themselves to be on the periphery, like Mario Vargas
Llosa, or Dostoyevsky, the subject of three essays in this
collection. The cultural predicament of Dostoyevsky is Mr. Pamuk's
own, and he zeroes right in on it. The true subject of ''Notes From
Underground,'' he writes, is ''the jealousy, anger and pride of a man
who cannot make himself into a European.''
Mr. Pamuk understands cultural isolation, more deeply than most
writers, perhaps, because he regards reading as a profoundly
isolating experience. The writers he most admires speak to him with
frightening intimacy.
''I felt as if Dostoyevsky were whispering arcane things about life
and humanity, things no one knew, for my ears only,'' he writes.
Almost in passing he offers a probing, quite personal analysis of
degradation as a perverse pleasure in the world of Dostoyevsky's
novels.
The linked sequence of essays about New York counts as a bonus.
Having been mugged, Mr. Pamuk spends a day with the police. He
ponders the mysteries of cinnamon rolls, runs into a long-lost
Turkish friend in a subway station and finally figures out why New
Yorkers hate smoking so much.
''They were not running away from the cancer that smoking might
cause, but from the smoker,'' he concludes. ''I would only gradually
come to understand that my cigarette to them represented a lack of
willpower and of culture, a disordered life, indifference and
(America's worst nightmare) failure.''
When let loose, Mr. Pamuk drops observations like this with deceptive
ease. An expert reader of Istanbul's multilayered text, he must have
found New York's embedded meanings child's play to extract. It's such
a small town, after all, by comparison.